As Election Day draws near, each headline we write, photo we publish and story we pursue or
ignore will receive intense scrutiny by those involved in the campaigns or interested in the
outcome.

Today’s front page contains a story about a poll we commissioned to gauge the mood of the
electorate as we sprint toward the voting booth.

The outcome of the Columbus schools’ 9.01-mill levy campaign is anybody’s guess. The fact that
it’s a virtual tie makes me happy: No one can accuse the poll of pushing voters one way or the
other.

Polls are important barometers of where people stand on an issue. They are expensive and
time-consuming. Darrel Rowland, our public affairs editor, worked for weeks with pollster
Saperstein Associates to craft a survey that answers the important questions and provides insights
into why voters feel as they do without leading the voter to any specific outcome.

When the research ends, the reporting begins. In addition to Rowland, two reporters and an
editor spent days contacting poll respondents to put names and voices behind the poll data, to give
the stories even greater context.

This newspaper has devoted a great deal of staff resources to coverage of this levy, and for
good reason: Few institutions in any community are as important as the schools. And with the state’s
biggest district in our front yard, information about this levy is important. Award-winning
reporters Jennifer Smith Richards and Bill Bush have been thorough in exploring the changes that
levy backers say will come from a successful campaign and pointing out questions that remain
unanswered.

The Columbus school levy has been our top reporting priority because of the size of the district
and the number of lives it affects.

Those who don’t live in the district also have votes to cast on other matters. For those of you
who don’t know who or what is on your ballot and want to know, we’ve made it easy for you at
dispatch.com/votersguide.

You can plug in your address and see what’s on your ballot. If you like, you can even print out
your choices from that website and take them with you to vote. If there are levies on your ballot,
you can type in your home value and see how much the levy would add to your property-tax bill. And
fear not, we have no way of capturing anything you look at or print out.

• • •

A Bexley reader called on Thursday to complain about a story we published regarding a rape.

The subject of the story was a woman who had been abducted from a COTA bus stop with her
3-year-old child, taken to an alley and raped as she clutched her daughter.

“It’s like pouring poison on readers,” she said. “I don’t think they need to know that stuff.
They can get the crime on TV — that’s where you get that kind of thing.”

The reader said that news reports of sex crimes excite men and encourage them to commit crimes.
Asked about readers’ need to know — and right to know — that a rapist was on the loose in a certain
area, she said that newspapers didn’t need to report that.

“I think when it comes to things everybody can read, to print all that in detail, it’s like
pornography,” she said, repeating that news reports of rape were like publishing pornography.

She suggested that we wrote about it to sensationalize the crime so that we could sell
newspapers.

While we do need to sell newspapers to stay in business, it’s unlikely that a story appearing in
one column on the cover of the third section inside the paper, as this one did, is going to boost
sales.

And I’d argue that anything that appears sensational in print is typically sensational because
the facts are sensational, not because we did something to make it appear sensational.

You can call it sensational or outrageous or even unbelievable, but when a woman says that a man
abducted her from a bus stop and raped her as she held onto her 3-year-old child, it is inherently
dramatic. And sickening.

And to suggest that reporting those facts is pornographic or would somehow arouse male readers
is a surprising conclusion. I’d be interested in what others think of that idea.

The discussion was an interesting one, and drove home again that everyone has a point of view,
and no point of view is necessarily wrong.

As editors, our job is to take the knowledge we have collectively gained through many years in
this community, add to it our training as journalists, and produce a paper that is informative and
helps us be active, intelligent residents of central Ohio.

Benjamin J. Marrison is editor of The Dispatch.
You can read his blog at
dispatch.com/blogs.